


i can't touch the sun (i can't find the one)

by sleepingontheceiling



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Murphy-centric, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 21:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8912329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepingontheceiling/pseuds/sleepingontheceiling
Summary: Because grounders wears paint and masks as faces and slick sky kids see ground for the first time and yell 'we're back bitches' and mountain people lay dead with fallen halos and John screams and screams and screams as he holds on. He won't let them fall. He doesn't go over that cliff. He'll just carry scars on his body and wear a collar on his neck.
He survives, he's survived a lot of things and he's paid for it.





	

He’s hugging himself so tightly that he can hardly breathe.

The fog descends upon him most days, like a fickle cloud. Sometimes bare, sometimes patchy, sometimes swallowing him completely whole.

(Does he even exist? Does he even want to?)

It reeks of love, of longing, of bleakness. It echoes like empty caves, locked lighthouses, boxes in the sky. It screeches of lost time, the absence of others. Like the touch of their soft skin, the words they gave to only him, the moments he once shared with them, the grace he was then given. He wasn’t always so alone.

He was loyal, once. He was happy once too. 

//

“Mama,” he breathes out to the silence, “Remember when you loved me?”

(She did, she did)

But the dead are gone now. And the living are hungry.

So he’ll breathe it back in and swallow his words. He'll taste them in familiar agony. Time dances around his head in vicious circles, again and again. It ticks, it tocks, it beats. He wonders where the little boy he was years ago is. If he is still inside him, trying to find a way out. He wonders what he would think of him now.

Because we all start dying the day we are born, because we somehow end up killing one another, because we seem to love each other too much or not at all.

(Your parents loved you, John)

But he forgets. Most days he forgets how to tell time outside of himself, outside his body, outside of his world. Most days, time is just a concept. So is love.

Because life somehow goes on even when you don’t.  
//

He thinks he's drunk. Or maybe he's just dreaming... but everything hurts. He's definitely crying.

He feels hands holding him, hears a soft voice whispering in his ear. "It’s ok." Nothing is quite right, nothing is making sense. They hate him.

"I think I'm a bad person," he confesses quickly, before the touch disappears. "I do bad things and I don't always mean to do them but they happen and people get hurt.”

"Murphy," Octavia says helplessly.

He looks at her, liking the way his name sounds when she says it, like a plea, like a call to reason. "There's something wrong, isn't there? There's something bad inside me," he rattles on.

She blinks hard, her warrior eyes glowing and her grounder braids flowing. "I get it."

"No, no, no." His words spill out dizzily. "There's nothing to get."

//

The dead are gone from here.

Not forgotten but gone. They floated away, they found the ground. Their eyes remained open and their hearts closed.

(So did his?)

Because the living, the living are hungry.

They are starved, like animals going extinct because something about them makes them different, it makes them special, makes them wanted, but it also makes them outcasts. Here, it makes them less human. It’s a terrifying sadness.

Murphy knows, you don’t just die because you don’t belong in this world and you don’t just live because you are trying to find a place in it. That's not how life works.

(That’s not how any of this works)

//

He's leaning.. leaning.. leaning.. and falling over into dreams. His pillow is cold. It's wet. It's not real. It's never real.

Murphy sits up, cross-legged in the dew of the morning, running his fingers through the soft grass. His nails are gone, they aren't growing back. He's trying to weave himself a crown with bloody fingers, but crowns aren't meant to be red. It's not like he's meant to have one anyway.

(He's not the King and will never fall in love with the princess)

Time slows down as he rolls himself over onto his back, his hair tangling, his skull pressing into the dirt. He's not alone.

Bellamy is beside him, laying with his hands behind his head. He's staring straight up at the sky, like there is some kind of peace hidden in the clouds. But it doesn't matter... neither of them can fly.

"We're different people," Bell suddenly blurts out.

"What?"

"Murphy," Bellamy spurts as he rolls over onto his side. "C'mon. We're different people. But we feel the same things."

John shrugs, grown-up, lanky shoulders bobbing into the grass. "Do we?"

(Do we?)

//

You live by dying. You die by living.

It’s in the air that once left his lungs from the noose on his neck and it was the ghost pain left over from the torture and it’s the way Bellamy’s mouth had once turned up into a smile.

(And Murphy smirked back because he would have followed him anywhere)

It’s like the oceans when the tide goes out, when something is pulled away from them, when something is laid absolutely bare and it’s the most horrifying and beautiful sight you could ever imagine in a post apocalyptic world. Like trusting someone and getting hung by them. Like trusting someone and getting punched right in the face.

(You love don't you? But you still hate and you hate and you hate)

It’s wrong. And it’s right.

//

Her deformed hand is in his own. He squeezes it gently, she holds on tightly.

"You don’t hate me," John says, like a question. He awaits an answer.

Emori pauses. "No."

He lets it go.

//

He gets numb to the pain. Numb to the hate. Numb.

(Honestly, you feel so much that you'd rather feel nothing at all)

It’s easy, numb is safe. Numb doesn’t have faces. Numb doesn’t care what other people think. But numb, numb is cold. So much that it’s stupid and he shivers most the time. Truth is an awful blanket that leaves you cold.

Even when everything seems to happen for a reason, life will still whack him in the head because he forgets how to duck. Because he forgets, he forgets that he can somehow avoid the hurt. He could have avoided a lot of things. But backing down means giving up and even assholes don't do that.

(It’s who you are, Murphy)

He hides fear with anger. He's just a kid. When you wear your insecurities like pockets it’s bound to be noticed. When there are holes and openings, something is bound to fall in. He’s so vulnerable that he’s brave. It’s almost funny.

(But nobody laughs, nobody laughs)

It’s okay. Life is tragically beautiful already.

//

The clock turned once and Raven fell twice and the sky cackled in glory and the darkness hissed in delight. 

But Murphy... Murphy tripped over freedom and danced in the north wind, fluttering, floating. He never wins. 

So she sits quietly nearby, tinkering with wires, maybe even hearts, trying to fix things that are breaking, falling apart. He chokes on some sort of regret. Maybe it’s not his own. 

No one can fix them. 

Murphy’s got a knife, he’s stabbing the table, keeping tally of their similarities, carving the wrongs they’ve done to each other on his skin. 

“Be careful Murphy,” Raven says, almost softly. 

He scoffs. “Is that a threat, Reyes?”

She glares. She cares? 

“It’s a warning.”

(It's a warning)

//

He wakes up different.

Murphy's head is buzzing, as if a thousand bees had somehow flown inside and have no idea how to get out of the maze that makes up his mind. His heart is pulsing so defiantly, so rapidly, that he is certain it is pounding outside his body. This isn't real. This isn't real.

Through it all, he hears a distinct noise above the others. The hum, the familiar hum from the Ark, that hum from the sky. He's in the skybox, his old cell, his old home. This can't be real.

He looks up to see Finn Collins before him, like a madman closing his eyes to darkness only to open them in tainted light.

(It's not real)

"I'm sorry," John pleads instantly. "It should have been me."

Finn makes a bewildering sound, like a bizarre cross between a sudden snort of amusement and a cut up choked off sob. “Shut up, Murphy."

He does.

// 

The trees laugh at him, don’t they? Not little giggles, not small chuckles, but real gut-wrenching laughter.

Those trees, those trees whisper to each other in secrets. They conspire with the wind, laughing triumphantly, as if they have made something out of absolutely nothing.

(Could you Murphy? Could you ever do something so great?)

He shuts his eyes, trying to see it all again, the happy memories, trying to not see this. He sees childhood dreams illuminated by the sun. Nobody ever mentioned that the Earth was so hot, nobody ever warned them that they would actually burn.

Because grounders wears masks as faces and slick sky kids see ground for the first time and yell 'we're back bitches' and mountain people lay dead with fallen halos and John screams and screams and screams as he holds on. He won't let them fall. He doesn't go over that cliff. He'll just carry scars on his body and wear a collar on his neck.

He survived, and he paid for it.

//

The world spinning, it is too big, too much, and Murphy feels like absolutely nothing in it.

He's minuscule in this dreamworld, in the real world, but Jaha clasps his shoulder to try to steady him. The crazy man stops, then murmurs, "This isn't your fault, John."

He clears his throat then; choking on wisdom, time, maybe even something like regret. Murphy just stills.

"But this could be your redemption."

//

Clarke Griffin pleas. The princess _pleas._

But it won’t change anything. Lexa is dead.

**(Reality sucks)**

Rivers are running down Clarke's cheeks. It's soft, messy, alluring, even in the reek of utter defeat. It's all the smoke that's left behind from the fire and it's burning bright in her eyes.

Murphy almost gags. He can feel it too, it's so heavy in the room and so familiar. The loss.

(We’re not minuscule in this world. Because we’re not minuscule to each other)

//

They are seeing green again, chopping down trees and getting lost in it all. Like people who love mad people and find peace in their eyes. Like people who love damaged people and find healing in their hands. Like people love people who have wronged them because they are the only ones who can seem to make it right.

(He can taste his name on Emori's lips. Remember Clarke calling him her friend. And Bellamy, pulling him up, pulling him home)

Because we are all tying fraying ropes into knots over and over again. Surviving that way. Attached, together, then pulled apart.

Forever missing people, forever missing time.

(Forever wanting them back)

**Author's Note:**

> Murphy deserves better. Or at least a little happiness. That's all.
> 
> Feedback always welcomed and appreciated. 
> 
> Thx.
> 
> \- han


End file.
